Pure Storage FlashBlade handles file and object data, complementing the vendor's flagship FlashArray SAN systems for block data. Pure first made a beta edition of FlashBlade available in March 2016. The vendor started shipping a "direct availability" model in July 2016 to selected customers, and FlashBlade became generally available on Jan. 25, 2017.

Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of products at Pure Storage, based in Mountain View, Calif., said the FlashBlade scale-out design accelerates both data and metadata. Early adopters include customers in automotive, financial services, gaming, healthcare, technical computing and web-scale cloud services.

"We're going after the area of large unstructured data," Kixmoeller said. "Historically, that's been the land of big, but slow, data. FlashBlade is about making big data faster."

"I will say the engineering and architecture is elegant, and it's extremely fast," Hogan said of FlashBlade. "It's a fantastic object store. We're keeping our eye on it as something that may eventually benefit us, but we're not there yet."

"From a market perspective, adding FlashBlade is a great move for Pure, but they certainly aren't the only vendor with a big data flash product on the market," said Eric Burgener, IDC's storage research director. "We'll see more systems introduced in [the] big data flash arena this year. Vendors have been selling flash for block-based workloads, but there's clearly a need for what flash brings in terms of better throughput, better reliability and higher storage density."

Pure Storage FlashBlade was designed from scratch as an all-flash system, which Burgener said gives it advantages over established systems that began in the hard disk drive world. Dell EMC added an all-flash version of its Isilon scale-out NAS that replaces spinning disk with SSDs.

"Pure built FlashBlade for flash from the ground up, and that has implications in lower consumption of energy, floor space and higher storage density," Burgener said.

1 comment

Register

Login

Forgot your password?

Your password has been sent to:

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy